Baylor Bears guard Odyssey Sims (0) goes for a steal as Kansas State Wildcats guard Haley Texada (1) advances the ball up the court in the first half of play during the Big 12 Women's Basketball Championship at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on March 9, 2013.

Brittney Griner dropped
a Big 12-record 50 points Monday against Kansas State.
When Baylor and the Wildcats met again Saturday in the quarterfinals of the
Phillips 66 Big 12 Women’s Basketball Championship at American
Airlines Center, Griner showed her
diversity and all-encompassing skills.

This time it had nothing to do with the 6-8
senior scoring or dunking. It was how the game’s best player
passed the ball.

In Baylor’s 80-47 thumping of KSU, Griner had
19 points, 13 rebounds and a career-high nine assists, narrowly missing her
sixth career triple-double.

“Telling you, I’m a point guard at heart,”
said Griner, who was presented with the Big 12 player of the year award before
the game.

The Lady Bears jumped all over the Wildcats from the start, hitting Kansas
State with a 10-minute
barrage that will be hard to forget. Meanwhile, Baylor (30-1) reached the
30-win mark for the third straight season.

“Coach said in the locker room that they were
on a mission,” said KSU senior Brittany Chambers, who had 21 points, all in the
second half. “They see it’s postseason and they have a goal, and they’re going
to get there. You could tell all their players were dialed
in, and they came at us hard right away.”

KSU coach Deb Patterson compared it to “being
in the middle of a buzz saw.”

Patterson used up four timeouts in the first
10:30, with Baylor up 31-6 when she called the fourth.

“It was a game in which you
wished you had 10 timeouts,” Patterson said.

Destiny Williams led Baylor with 20 points on
9-of-11 shooting. Odyssey Sims had 10 points and seven assists for the Lady
Bears, who will face Oklahoma
State in a semifinal at 1
p.m. Sunday.

Undersized Kansas State (15-17) — its tallest
available player is 5-11, which made the tip-off against Griner inadvertently
comical — could not get comfortable against Baylor’s aggressive, switching
defense. Griner, who had three blocks, and the other Lady Bears forced the
Wildcats to throw up 3’s for their only offense. They didn’t score the first of
their four two-point baskets until early in the second half.

KSU had hung around in Monday’s game, before
losing big, by hitting from the outside. But Baylor cranked up the defense
Saturday.

“We communicated better on the defensive end,”
Baylor coach Kim Mulkey said. “We switched, never allowed them to dribble
penetrate, get us sucked in and then kick it out and hit all the 3-pointers.
Every position on the floor, we guarded.”

As for Griner, she seemed as satisfied with
every assist as every point, including a sequence early on in which Sims passed
to Griner, who sent a bounce pass to Jordan Madden for a layup.

“I guess I kind of developed it over the
years, just finding my teammates,” said Griner, whose previous career high in
assists was seven. “Freshman year I had a lot of turnovers.

“My assists weren’t too good. But now they’re
better, and my teammates do a great job of cutting and letting me find them.”

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